Bashiok on Damage Types

Posted By: September 3, 2009

A fan noticed the “holy magic” damage type listed on some Monk Skills, and asked if the fire, cold, lightning, poison, arcane, and physical were the only six types of damage we’d see in Diablo 3? Bashiok replied in somewhat ambiguous fashion.

Damage types aren’t actually completely finalized. There’s likely to be some additions, maybe some combinations. For instance people may have noticed that a few of the Witch Doctor Skills refer to a damage type called “black magic”. All of the monk spells seen relied purely on weapon damage as their base, but that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be a holy damage type. What we don’t want is for players to carry around a ton of different resistance sets to deal with a large number of different types of damages. There’s quite a few different ways to go about solving that, but just to be clear we want damage types to serve the gameplay and not require players to have to pursue complex or item-heavy solutions to it.

On a similar note is there any plans to include damage type on the skills’ tooltips?

Bashiok: Probably. At the very least on skills that it may not be obvious for, which if I were to guess would probably just make it easier to list it for all of them. But, UI/skill description brevity is always a goal, so we’ll see.